
It's official: Love Island will celebrate 10 years with an anniversary special
Calling all Love Island fans: your year is about to get 100x times better.
It's no secret that the iconic (see: dramatic) dating show is turning 10 in 2025, and like us, you've probably been wondering how such a momentous occasion will be marked.
Thankfully, the wait is over. Because as we edge into the villa season, ITV has confirmed that not only will we be getting a 12th season, but a 10th anniversary special is also in the works. Yes, we were literally shooketh when we heard the news, too.
Titled Love Island: A Decade of Love, the one-off show will bring back some of the most beloved and memorable Islanders. Their role? To reminisce on their time in the villa, reflect on the show that changed their lives, and perhaps ignite some classic LI drama along the way.
According to ITV, returning couples include series two winners Cara De La Hoyde-Massey and Nathan Massey (who are now married with two kids), series seven champs Millie Court and Liam Reardon, series nine winners Kai Fagan and Sanam Harrinanan and series eight finalists Indiyah Polack and Dami Hope.
Not only will the above couples make an appearance - all of whom have proved that the Love Island cupid does exist - other classic characters are set to return. This includes Hannah Elizabeth, Gabby Allen, Montana Brown, Dani Dyer, Georgia Steel, Curtis Pritchard, Anton Danyluk, Whitney Adebayo, Catherine Agbaje and more.
Following the announcement, Mike Spencer, Love Island's creative director said: "We've had an incredible ten years of love, drama and unforgettable moments in the villa - now it's time to look back and celebrate the icons who made it all happen. Expect big laughs and plenty of heart as we revisit a decade of Love Island magic."
While there's currently no date for the anniversary special, we do know it will air on ITV2 and ITVX sometime before the new series. FYI, it won't be too long, as Maya Jama and a new cast of singletons will be descending on the Mallorcan villa next month.
2025 is the 'Summer of Love-Island.' We said it here first.
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Forbes
13 hours ago
- Forbes
All The ‘Love Island USA' Couples Who Are Still Together From Every Season
The texts are rolling in as a new season of Love Island USA kicked off on June 3 on Peacock. As you watch, you might be wondering which couples from past seasons are still together, especially the fan-favorite pairs from the Season 6. Based on the popular UK series of the same name, Love Island USA premiered in 2019 and follows a group of contestants, called Islanders, who are searching for love and competing for a $100,000 cash prize. Throughout the show, the Islanders must couple up, compete in challenges that test their relationships, and navigate the arrival of new 'bombshells,' forcing them to decide whether to stay with their current partners or couple up with someone new. The seventh season of the dating show is currently underway – and a lot has happened in the first week, including 27-year-old Yulissa Escobar getting kicked out of the villa in the middle of the night after podcast videos resurfaced of her using racial slurs ahead of the premiere. If you're wondering where your favorite Love Island USA couples are now, including the standout Season 6 cast, there's good news. Peacock has greenlit a spinoff series tentatively titled Love Island: Beyond the Villa. The show will reunite some Islanders from Season 6 as they arrive in Los Angeles 'to navigate new careers, evolving friendships, newfound fame and the complex relationships they cultivated at the villa,' according to NBC. As fans await the premiere of Love Island: Beyond the Villa and the Season 7 finale in five weeks, here's a look at which couples from all seasons are still together. Read on to find out which Love Island USA couples are still together after leaving paradise. (Spoiler: None of the pairs from Seasons 1 through 4 lasted, so we're picking things up with Season 5.) Status: In a relationship Taylor Smith and Carsten 'Bergie' Bergersen met on the fifth season of Love Island USA and are still happily together. The pair will be celebrating their two-year anniversary in August. Bergersen posted a heartfelt post on Instagram for Taylor's birthday in February. "Happy Birthday to the Love of my Life @taylor98smith!" he penned in the caption. "Taylor you have been the best thing to ever happen to me. You have helped me become a better man with all the challenges life has faced us with since leaving the villa. I couldn't imagine going through life without you." He also thanked Taylor for supporting 'every decision I have made' and believing he 'could do it" – even when he had doubts. "You were everything I was looking for in the villa. I can't way to go through this next year of life with you, whether we're cuddling with stuffed animals, hanging out with family, using chopsticks because you taught me how to use them, listening to Tate McRae for the millionth time, or just living life together. I love you babe! Happy Birthday!' Status: Engaged Wedding bells are ringing for Love Island USA couple Marco Donatelli and Hannah Wright! The couple recently got engaged on May 28 on the beach in Punta Cana, becoming the first pair from the series to reach the exciting relationship milestone. Donatelli told People he began planning the surprise proposal 'nine months' ago and finalized the details in December 2024. "Here we are, the Dominican Republic. This is about us but most importantly it's about you and everything you have done to change my life over the past two years. You are my pride, my joy, and my everything," Donatelli said in a video of the proposal posted to Instagram. Meanwhile, Hannah shared that she was 'shocked' and unaware that the proposal would happen during their getaway. "I was convinced that we were solely there for a vacation trip," Wright told the magazine. 'I was crying the whole time the setup was beautiful and felt like a dream.' Status: In a relationship Season 6 winners Kordell Beckham and Serena Page are still together following their Love Island USA victory. After leaving the villa, Kordell moved to Los Angeles, where Serena was living – but they're not living together just yet. Serena told People that they want to get engaged before living together. "No apartment. There's none of that. The next step would be engagement," she clarified. 'And we need some time for that... This is my apartment. My finger's empty and so is my apartment. I can live with you when we're engaged.' The couple also gave an update to Cosmopolitan, where Serena said she loves how considerate and sweet Kordell is. "He hypes me up and makes me feel so comfortable... comfortable enough to do weird stuff!' she added. Status: In a relationship Season 5 Love Island USA favorites Leah Kateb and Miguel Harichi are also still together. In December 2024, Harichi confirmed to US Weekly that things are 'going great' between the pair. "It's never a boring moment for us,' he said. 'The relationship is just progressing. I love her more and more every day.' Although they're not engaged or married yet, TikTok users were quick to point out that he often refers to Leah as his 'wife' in videos, which he later clarified. 'She's not my wife legally,' he said to the outlet. 'We haven't gone and got married, but for me, I just view her as my wife. When I date, I date for marriage. I don't see any short-term things. Even though we aren't married yet, I just view her as my woman, my second half, my wife. For me, it's another way of putting her as my queen, my princess.' Status: In a relationship JaNa and Kenny are still happily together and are slated to appear in Love Island: Beyond the Villa alongside the Season 6 main cast later this summer. They officially became boyfriend and girlfriend shortly after leaving the villa. 'My biggest priority is to make sure Kenny feels comfortable at all times,' JaNa told Us Weekly in August 2024 when asked about their engagement timeline. 'He keeps me stable. So whatever he wants, I want!' Their one-year anniversary is coming up on Aug. 9, and Kenny told the magazine that he has a special surprise planned for the milestone. 'There's a trip. There's a trip planned. They're in the works,' he teased. 'That's all I can say. She's dropping subtle hints.' JaNa added, 'I asked him if we could go to Italy for our one-year, so …' Love Island USA Season 7 is airing daily, except for Wednesdays, on Peacock. Check out the full release schedule below.
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
Money Is Ruining Television
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Watching Carrie Bradshaw—erstwhile sex columnist, intrepid singleton, striver—float down the majestic staircase of her new Gramercy townhouse on a recent episode of And Just Like That while wearing a transparent tulle gown, on an errand to mail a letter, is one of the most cognitively dissonant television experiences I've had recently. And Just Like That has never been a particularly imaginative show with regard to women in midlife, but there's still something fundamentally off about seeing one of the canonical female characters of our era transformed into a Gilded Age archetype, worrying about a garden renovation and choosing back-ordered fabric for a chaise. Carrie, suddenly, has many hats. She communicates with a lover via handwritten notes while she waits for his liberation from the home front in Virginia. What's happened to Carrie, truly, is money. Two decades after Sex and the City rolled to a televised close, acknowledging that its own cultural relevance was waning, its characters continue in zombified form on And Just Like That, pickled in a state of extreme privilege where nothing can touch them. The drama is lifeless, involving rehashed old storylines about beeping alarm systems and 'a woman's right to shoes' that serve mostly as a backdrop for clothes. Charlotte, in a questionable lace workout jacket, worries that her dog has been unfairly canceled. Miranda, in one of a series of patterned blouses, gets really into a Love Island–style reality show. (Remember Jules and Mimi?) Lisa wears feathers to a fundraiser for her husband's political campaign. Seema, in lingerie, nearly burns her apartment down when she falls asleep with a lit cigarette, but in the end, all she loses is an inch or so of hair. The point of the show is no longer what happens, because nothing does. The point is to set up a series of visual tableaus showcasing all the things money can buy, as though the show were an animated special issue of Vogue or Architectural Digest. What's stranger still is that a series that once celebrated women in the workplace has succumbed to financial ideals right out of Edith Wharton: The women who earned their money themselves (Miranda and Seema) somehow don't have enough of it (spoiler—they still seem to have a lot), while the ones who married money (Carrie, Charlotte, Lisa) breeze through life as an array of lunches, fundraisers, and glamping trips, with some creative work dotted into the mix for variety. The banal details of exorbitant wealth—well, it's all quite boring. [Read: We need to talk about Miranda] Lately, most of television seems stuck in the same mode. Virtually everything I've watched recently has been some variation of rich people pottering around in 'aspirational' compounds. On Sirens and The Better Sister, glossy scenes of sleek couture and property porn upstage the intrigue of the plot. On Mountainhead, tech billionaires tussle in a Utah mountain retreat featuring 21,000 square feet of customized bowling alleys and basketball courts. On Your Friends & Neighbors, a disgraced hedge-fund manager sneers at the vacuous wealth of his gated community (where houses cost seven to eight figures), but also goes to criminal lengths to maintain his own living standards rather than lower them by even a smidge. And on With Love, Meghan, the humble cooking show has gotten a Montecito-money glow-up. 'I miss TV without rich people,' the writer Emily J. Smith noted last month on Substack, observing that even supposedly normie shows such as Tina Fey's marital comedy The Four Seasons and Erin Foster's unconventional rom-com Nobody Wants This seem to be playing out in worlds where money is just not an issue for anyone. This is a new development: As Smith points out, sitcoms including Roseanne and Married … With Children have historically featured families with recognizable financial constraints, and the more recent dramedies of the 2010s were riddled with economic anxiety. Reality television, it's worth noting, has been fixated on the lifestyles of the rich and bored virtually since its inception, but as its biggest stars have grown their own fortunes exponentially, the genre has mostly stopped documenting anything other than wealth, which it fetishizes via the gaudy enclaves and private jets of Selling Sunset and Bling Empire. Serialized shows, too, no longer seem interested in considering the stakes and subtleties of most people's lives. Television is preoccupied with literary adaptations about troubled rich white women, barbed satires about absurdly wealthy people on vacation, thrillers about billionaire enclaves at the end of the world. Even our contemporary workplace series (Severance, Shrinking) play out in fictional realms where people work not for the humble paychecks that sustain their lives, but to escape the grief that might otherwise consume them. What does it mean that our predominant fictional landscapes are all so undeniably 'elevated,' to use a word cribbed from the Duchess of Sussex? And Just Like That is evidence of how hard it is for shows that take wealth for granted to have narrative stakes, and how stultifying they become as a result. But we also lose something vital when we no longer see 99 percent of American lives reflected on the small screen. Money isn't just making TV boring. It's also reshaping our collective psyche—building a shared sense of wealth as the only marker of a significant life, and rich people as the only people worthy of our gaze. We're not supposed to be able to empathize with the characters on-screen, these strutting zoo animals in $1,200 shoes and $30,000-a-night villas. But we're not being encouraged to empathize with any other kinds of characters, either—to see the full humanity and complexity of so many average people whose lives feel ever more precarious in this moment, and ever more in need of our awareness. On an episode in the final season of Sex and the City, a socialite named Lexi Featherston cracks a floor-to-ceiling window, lights a cigarette, and declares that New York is over, O-V-E-R. 'When did everybody stop smoking?' she sneers. 'When did everybody pair off?' As the hostess glares at her, she continues: 'No one's fun anymore. Whatever happened to fun? God, I'm so bored I could die.' Famous last words: Lexi, of course, promptly trips on her stiletto, falls out the absurdly dangerous glass panel, and plummets to her death. Her arc—from exalted '80s It Girl to coked-up aging party girl—was supposed to represent finality, the termination of the city's relevance as a cultural nexus. 'It's the end of an era,' Carrie says at Lexi's funeral, where Stanford is elated to have scored VIP seats next to Hugh Jackman. 'The party's officially over,' Samantha agrees. After six seasons of transforming how a generation of women dated, dressed, even drank, Sex and the City seemed to be acknowledging that its own moment had come to an end. The characters were undeniably older, no longer seeking anthropological meaning in a SoHo nightclub at 3 a.m. But the city that the show documented—and popular culture more broadly—had shifted, too: toward less spontaneity, less rebellion, and infinitely higher incomes. [Read: The ghost of a once era-defining show] The year that final season aired, 2004, is possibly when television's prurient obsession with rich people really kicked off, with the launch of shows including Desperate Housewives, Entourage, and, notably, The Apprentice. A year earlier, Fox had premiered a soapy drama called The O.C., which charted the rags–to–Range Rover adventures of a teen from Chino who ended up ensconced in the affluent coastal town of Newport Beach. Until then, it had never occurred to me that teenagers could wear Chanel or drive SUVs that cost six figures, although watching them rattle around in McMansions the size of the Met provided much of The O.C.'s visual thrill. In direct response to the show's success, MTV debuted the reality show Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County a year later, and in 2006, Bravo countered with its own voyeuristic peek into the lives of the rich and fabulous—The Real Housewives of Orange County. Documenting wealth enticingly on television is a difficult balancing act: You want to stoke enough envy that people are inspired to buy things (gratifying advertisers along the way), but not so much that you risk alienating the viewer. Reality TV pulled it off by starting small. The women on the first season of Real Housewives were well off, but not unimaginably so. They lived in high-end family homes, not sprawling temples of megawealth. Similarly, when Keeping Up With the Kardashians debuted in 2007, the family lived in a generous but chintzy bungalow, having not yet generated the billions of dollars that would later pay for their minimalist compounds in Calabasas and Hidden Hills. During the 2008 financial crisis, a critic for The New York Times wondered whether the tanking global economy might doom the prospects of shows such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta, which had just premiered, and turn them into 'a time capsule of the Bling Decade.' But the fragility of viewers' own finances, oddly, seemed to make them more eager to watch. Shows about money gratified both people's escapist impulses and the desire to critique those who didn't seem worthy of their blessings. As Jennifer O'Connell, a producer for The Real Housewives of New York City, put it to the Times a year later: 'Everyone likes to judge.' The toxic, unhappy, rich-people shows that have more recently proliferated on prestige TV—the Succession and White Lotus and Big Little Lies variation—cover their backs with cynicism. Money doesn't make you happy, they assert over and over, even though studies suggest otherwise. The documentation of extreme wealth on television with such clarifying bitterness, they imply, surely inoculates audiences from pernicious aspiration. Except it doesn't: The Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in Sicily was fully booked for a good six months following the second season of The White Lotus, despite the fictional bodies floating in the water. And a study conducted at the London School of Economics in 2018 found that a person's increased exposure to shows that regularly 'glamourize fame, luxury, and the accumulation of wealth' made them more inclined to support welfare cuts; it also noted other studies that found that the more people watched materialistic media, the more anxious and unhappy they were likely to be in their own lives. Watching shows about wealth does, however, seem to stimulate the desire to shop, which is maybe why this latest season of And Just Like That feels intended for an audience watching with a second screen in their hand—all the better to harvest the aspirational consumption the show's lifestyles might generate. Streaming services are already tapping into the reams of data they have on viewers by serving them customized ads related to the series they might be watching, and many are also experimenting with e-commerce. You could argue that And Just Like That is honoring the spirit of Sex and the City by putting fashion front and center. But the vacant dullness of the new season feels wholly of its time: This is television for the skin-deep influencer age, not the messy, pioneering drama it once was. More crucially, Carrie and company take up space that deprives us of more shows like The Pitt, one of a sparse handful of series documenting the workers trying to patch up the holes in an ever more unequal America. No one seems to have anticipated that the Max series would be such a success. As workers today are being squeezed 'for all their worth, no more chit-chatting at the water cooler, we've gotten to a point where reality for most people is quite unpleasant,' Smith writes on Substack. 'And executives are betting that we don't actually want to watch it.' The reality of the TV business also underscores why shows that sell us something—even if it's just the illusion of exceptional prosperity as a default—are easier to commission. But audiences will always be drawn to drama, and the stakes of defiantly deglamorized series such as The Bear and Slow Horses feel necessary in this moment, when the state of the future relies so much on the direction and quality of our attention. Article originally published at The Atlantic


Business Upturn
14 hours ago
- Business Upturn
What's next in Love Island USA Season 7 Episode 5? Recoupling drama and new bombshells await
By Aman Shukla Published on June 7, 2025, 19:00 IST Last updated June 7, 2025, 13:50 IST Love Island USA Season 7 is heating up, and Episode 5 promises to deliver more steamy romance, jaw-dropping drama, and unexpected twists in the Fiji villa. Hosted by Ariana Madix, the reality dating show continues to captivate audiences with its mix of love, betrayal, and challenges. If you're wondering what's in store for Episode 5, here's a breakdown of what to expect based on the season's trajectory so far. Love Island USA Season 7 Episode 5: What to Expect Recoupling Tensions Reach a Boiling Point Episode 4 left the villa in chaos after a flirty baseball challenge and the arrival of bombshells Hannah and Amaya, which stirred insecurities and sparked drama. The recoupling ceremony looms large in Episode 5, and the choices made will likely shake up existing pairs. Current couples—Huda Mustafa and Jeremiah Brown, Olandria Carthen and Taylor Williams, Chelley Bissainthe and Austin Shepard, and Cierra Ortega and Nicolas Vansteenberghe—are under pressure, while singles like Belle-A Walker, Ace Greene, Charlie Georgiou, Hannah, and Amaya are poised to make bold moves. Expect fiery confrontations at the firepit as Islanders navigate loyalty, attraction, and betrayal. Huda and Jeremiah's Bond Faces New Tests Huda Mustafa's emotional revelation about being a single mom in Episode 4 deepened her connection with Jeremiah Brown, but the baseball challenge exposed vulnerabilities when bombshells Hannah and Amaya got physical with him. Episode 5 will likely explore whether Jeremiah's reassurances hold firm or if Huda's insecurities, amplified by the new girls' bold advances, create distance. Belle-A's Love Triangle Drama Escalates Belle-A Walker stirred the pot in Episode 4 by embracing her wild side during the baseball challenge, locking lips with Nic Vansteenberghe and fueling a love triangle with bombshell Cierra Ortega. Nic's indecision between Belle-A's sweet charm and Cierra's bold confidence left him in hot water, and Episode 5 will likely force him to make a choice during the recoupling. Will Belle-A's spicy moves secure her spot, or will Cierra's assertive approach win Nic over? This triangle is a ticking time bomb, and the fallout will be must-watch TV. How to Watch Love Island USA Season 7 Episode 5 Catch Love Island USA Season 7 Episode 5 on Peacock at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on June 7, 2025. New episodes stream daily, except Wednesdays, with Aftersun airing Saturdays. Aman Shukla is a post-graduate in mass communication . A media enthusiast who has a strong hold on communication ,content writing and copy writing. Aman is currently working as journalist at